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Integrated Microsystems Laboratory Seminar

“A Journey through Blockchains” or How Not to Miss the Forest for the Merkle Trees

Alex Daskalov
KN0X Industries
Montreal

January 30, 2018 at
11:00 AMMcConnell Engineering Room 603

Abstract:

What started as a radical experiment sparked by Satoshi's landmark paper published less than
ten years ago has exploded into one of the hottest research areas to emerge in recent memory.
Bringing together top academics from a range of disciplines, this nascent yet quickly
expanding research frontier has exposed a massive set of problems that are desperately
yearning to be tackled by creative minds. With profound implications for the fabric of our
society, and the potential to overturn incumbent socioeconomic models and the basic tenets
of human organization, cooperation, and governance, the world is watching intently. In this
seminar, Alex Daskalov will distill the key areas developing in this space, and a collection of
research directions that will be traversed in the coming decades. From novel Byzantine
agreement protocols touching on the core of a blockchain's ability to generate trust-less
consensus, through applying zero knowledge proofs across both privacy and scalability
challenges, to the use of formal methods for the all-important guarantees of correctness, this
is a research area thirsting for top-tier academics. We are still in the early days of these
technologies, and there are many interesting problems to explore with important
consequences should solutions be found for them.

Speaker Bio:

Alex Daskalov (McGill B.Eng Software Engineering), is a co-founder and the
CTO of KNØX Industries, a venture backed startup building the first cryptocurrency custody
platform. At KNØX, Alex works on a broad range of deep technology problems in the
blockchain realm. Prior to KNØX, Alex co-founded Rhodium Labs, a Montreal based
research firm focused on distributed systems and computational finance whose clients
included large actors in defense, insurance, and finance industries. He’s excited and
optimistic about the future of decentralized systems and their potential to help humanity
produce novel social systems that drive human co-operation.